We collect traffic metadata and cached content for website traffic passed through Project Shield. This helps us detect and defend against DDoS attacks.
We also ask for your website’s configuration data — your website's origin server, domains, and subdomains — to set up Project Shield. We hold on to this for as long as you have an account with Project Shield. You can delete your Project Shield account at any time.
Data and web traffic may be processed and stored in the US or other countries.
How do you use my website and website visitors’ data?
Project Shield collects web traffic logs, and other data on how we serve your traffic, to help improve Project Shield's service and performance.
Project Shield does not collect data to improve search results or target advertising.
Does Google’s Privacy Policy apply to visitors to my website?
No. Your website’s own policies and terms of service — including how you manage user data and privacy — apply to people visiting your site, not Google’s privacy policy and terms of service.
Can people tell that I’m using Project Shield?
Yes. Domain Name System (DNS) records are public information and will show that you are pointed at Project Shield servers.
When you set up Project Shield, you point your traffic at Project Shield servers. Anyone can use a public website to look up your DNS records and see what IP address or host name your website points to.
You might want to look into frangible rounds. They're pretty reliable these days
Sure, if by "reliable" you mean "make a wide, shallow, ugly-looking wound that doesn't cause sufficient bleeding to make the attacker stop". In general, I recommend sticking with what the police use. They have the resources and the need to do the relevant testing. They don't use frangible rounds, they use standard JHPs.
Avoiding being open source because you don't understand how to create a modern business model around it is a problem that largely went away over a decade ago.
Nonsense. Yes, there are successful business models around open source, but they're more challenging to maintain and manage, and tend to to have growth ceilings that traditional models do not. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with closed source models, unless they're forcing out open source solutions. Given the existence of gitlab, that's clearly not the case here. Github should do what its owners believe is best for their business. Customers will either stick with them, or not. So far, it's working pretty well for them.
A further initiative these guys are taking that I fully endorse: and end to the so-called "land-fill Android" syndrome
I don't see anything about the other big cause of land-fill Android syndrome: software updates. Are they also going to update the phone to new OS versions for a decade or so?
Of course it will backfire. People will have to save more fore retirement since they cannot count on positive interest to produce gains.
That would be a particularly foolish response.
The smart response to negative interest (and deflation) is to spend your money on durable and valuable goods. Predicting what will hold value is challenging, of course.
Here's the thing, I dont really care about something as trivial as a/. account. To expend efforts on securing that against all manner of threats wastes resources.
You missed the point, completely. It's not that someone may snoop on your/. browsing or credentials, it's that someone will inject arbitrary other content into what you're retrieving from the/. server, which can be used to compromise your machine, extract credentials from your browser, etc.
Also TLS is not immune to MITM attacks. It makes it harder, sure but not immune.
Unless the attacker has compromised a CA, and barring bugs in your TLS stack (which used to be a big problem, but has recently gotten cleaned up), yes it is immune to MITM attacks.
Besides this you've got the traditional methods of social engineering, for example, a user goes to hsbc.co.uk and the rouge access point is configured to send them to hsbc.malice.com which looks identical to HSBC's internet banking site.
Unless you look at your browser window to see if the connection is secure.
We really need to get to a point where all web sites use TLS and browsers can be configured (or are configured by default!) to reject any HTTP connection. Then you won't need to look.
Granted, the risk of this kind of attack is low, which is why it's not worth protecting my/. account but it is worth protecting my banking details and credit card numbers.
You fail to understand the threat models here. The point is that your bank's site was built under the assumption that the network between the bank and your computer is untrustworthy, while slashdot was built with the assumption that it is trustworthy. When you know it's not, you're still safe with the bank because no security assumptions are being violated. Not so with slashdot.
I've always found it wise to err on the side of caution.
Except that you're erring on the side of risk because you don't understand the security issues.
Oh really? So y'all have re-engineered Nest not to connect to Google's "cloud" anymore, then? 'Cause for IoT stuff, "security" means nothing less than the owner hosting his own server!
That may be your definition but it's hardly the only one, and it's not one that's at all interesting to the vast majority of people, who have no interest at all in hosting their own server and like what the cloud provides.
Also, Nest does not use Brillo. Maybe it will in the future, dunno.
I use free wifi for browsing/. but not for doing banking
That's backwards. Your bank's web site is authenticated, so your browser can fairly strongly verify that it's legitimate, and the data is encrypted and authenticated so it can't be modified. Browsing/. (or any non-TLS web site), on the other hand, is dangerous because the Wifi operator can inject whatever they like into the stream. Exploits that target your browser, drive-by downloads, ads, tracking cookies (for any site)... whatever they like.
Unless your bank has screwed something up, you can safely do your banking on a hostile network, but browsing/. is risky.
Same engineers who are busy throwing together the IoT without a second thought on security?
I can tell you the Google Brillo (Google's Android-derived IoT OS) team is definitely focused on security. Most of them came from the ChromeOS team, which is extraordinarily secure, and they brought that focus with them (plus Google in general is pretty good about taking security seriously).
I'd agree if you fled and then had to be captured to come back for trial. Coming back voluntarily, specifically to be tried, puts a rather different spin on it.
The problem is he wants a fair trial, AS DEFINED BY EDWARD SNOWDEN.
I imagine he would define "fair" as in "not held in a secret/closed courtroom, with the press allowed to attend, with a jury of his peers, with his defense being allowed to actually see the evidence against him, etc."
And, no, he's never going to get all that.
And bail. Which should be a slam dunk in a fair courtroom. Since Snowden would have returned voluntarily to have his day in court, the judge shouldn't consider him a flight risk.
Now it won't be their system which is insecure, it'll be your phone. This gives them another layer of defense against their often laughably bad security.
Except that, according to federal law, they're liable for the fraud anyway.
To be precise, for ATM and debit cards (which this would be), your liability varies according to how quickly you report a lost or stolen card. $0 if you report the loss before it's used, $50 if you report the loss within two days after you learn about it, $500 if you report it within 60 days after your statement (containing fraudulent transactions) is sent to you. For a phone-based version, if it turns out to be vulnerable to attacks and you're defrauded as a result of that while the phone is in your possession, the FTC would force the banks to eat all of the fraud because there's no way you could have known to report. If your phone is lost or stolen, the normal reporting rules would apply.
Also, it's rather ridiculous that you think your phone is less secure than a piece of plastic with a magnetic stripe on it. The security of your ATM/debit card, what there is of it, lies entirely in the PIN because copying magnetic stripes is trivial (called "skimming"). And that PIN doesn't provide much security because the classic way to commit ATM/debit card fraud is with a fake ATM or point of sale device which captures your magstripe when you swipe, and your PIN when you enter it.
Your phone does have additional attack vectors because it is a networked device, but mobile phone OSes already have protections in place to mitigate that. iOS has the secure enclave and Android has the hardware-backed keystore[*], both of which allow the phone to carry non-extractable cryptographic credentials which are bound to user authentication (though Android only started providing the authentication binding in Marshmallow, so it'll be a couple of years before it's widespread, but it'll take longer than that to widely deploy new ATMs).
Banks will also apply their normal risk management engines to decide if the transaction is legitimate, and the phone offers a far richer set of data elements they can use, making it harder to convince their systems that a fraudulent transaction isn't legitimate.
Banks clearly are not "passing the buck", because federal law won't let them. No, they're doing this because it really will be more secure, which will save them money by reducing the fraud they have to cover. This is a totally self-interested move on their part, sure, and the goal is to reduce fraud liability, but your cynical interpretation of how that will happen is dead wrong.
I don't see how what you know how to do or are interested in learning to do are at all relevant to the impact of the breach or why the attackers might be interested in selling the database.
I'd strip out the time checks and security from the phpBB script, run it locally, and hammer that with a dictionary and then a brute force attack. It'd work and I'm gonna get results
Sure, but a few orders of magnitude slower than doing the hashing locally on dedicated hardware.
The best way to do this is to run the hashing on a set of GPUs, each of which has dozens to hundreds of cores. With your method you'll be lucky to test a thousand passwords per second. With dedicated hardware -- and assuming a computationally cheap hash like SHA-256 or MD-5, you can build a system that will test a billion passwords per second for a few thousand dollars -- or rent one on AWS or similar for a few hundred dollars (AWS has systems with GPUs for computation). If the target database used a proper password hashing algorithm like PBKDF2, scrypt, bcrypt, Argon2, etc., then it's slower on a given amount of hardware, but you can always speed it up by throwing more hardware at it.
Doesn't phpBB use different salts for each user? If they do and if I am understanding properly then I'm not sure how far they'll get? Though, to be clear, I am not 100% certain that I'm understanding everything correctly. They really shouldn't be able to do much in the way of brute forcing?
Doesn't matter.
Unique salt (which is the only way to do salt; there's zero reason to bother salting if the salts aren't unique), just means that each password has to be brute forced individually. But passwords can be tested so fast that a high percentage of passwords on most sites are found with only a few minutes effort, so brute forcing is well worth the effort.
Passwords suck, and they're getting worse all the time.
This woman is either a idiot savant, or she's a political genius who should have run for office
Or she's a normal 60 year-old woman of average intelligence, who lived through the Cold War and isn't a poli-sci major, and therefore conflates authoritarianism and communism because for most of her life political discourse drew no distinction between the two. So she just used what she knew to be a pointed "synonym" for authoritarianism.
The fact that this is a beautiful smear of the government policy was intentional, but inevitably so, not due to particular cleverness on her part. The reason "communism" is a smear is because of that same Cold War history. Had the Cold War authoritarian opponent been under some other system, that's what the woman would conflate with authoritarianism... and associating this action with that other system would have been a beautiful smear.
Modern nuclear plans with light water reactors have strong manoeuvring capabilities. Nuclear power
plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode, i.e. participate in the primary and
secondary frequency control, and some units follow a variable load programme with one or two large
power changes per day. In France, load-following is needed to balance daily and weekly power variations
of the electricity supply and demand, since nuclear power plants have a large share in the national mix. In
Germany, load-following became important in recent years when a large share of intermittent sources of
electricity generation (e.g. wind) was introduced to the national mix.
The minimum requirements for the manoeuvrability capabilities of the modern reactors are defined by
the utilities requirements that are based on the requirements of the grid operators. For example, according
to the current version of the European Utilities Requirements (EUR) the NPP must at least be capable of
daily load cycling operation between 50% and 100% of its rated power P r , with a rate of change of electric
output of 3-5% of P r per minute.
Most of the modern designs implement even higher manoeuvrability capabilities, with the possibility
of planned and unplanned load-following in the wide power range and with ramps of 5%P r per minute.
Some designs are capable of extremely fast power modulations in the frequency regulation mode with
ramps of several percent of the rated power per second, in the narrow band around the power level.
The economic consequences of load-following are mainly related to the reduction of the load factor.
In the case of nuclear, fuel costs represent a small fraction of the electricity generating cost, if compared
with fissile sources. Thus, operating at higher load factors is profitable for nuclear power plants, since they
cannot make savings on the fuel cost while not producing electricity. In France, the impact of load-
following on the average unit capability factor is sometimes estimated as about 1.2%.
Since most of the currently used nuclear power plants implement strong manoeuvrability capabilities
in their designs (except for some very old NPPs), there is no or very small impact (within the design
margins) of the load-following on acceleration of ageing of large equipment components. However, there
is some influence of the load-following on the ageing of some operational components (e.g. valves), and
thus one can expect a slight increase of the maintenance costs. Also, for older plants some additional
investment could be needed, especially in instrumentation and control, in order to become eligible for
operation in the load-following mode.
Overeating can be a coping mechanism for environmental stress. Abusive parents who nevertheless keep the fridge well-stocked could cause a kid to be fat. I'm not saying that's what the GP's principal believed, but excessive weight could be a sign of emotional abuse.
Nice selective reading/quoting. You forgot to mention "tourism spending has gone up 2 billion dollars in the 10 years since the Olympics". Compared to that, the $4.5M annual deficit of the venues is chump change. If needed they could just levy a small tax on every non-resident ski lift ticket sold and cover that easily. But they don't have to, because there's an endowment which is still funding them (though it will run out eventually).
And while the ski resort owners would undoubtedly complain about the tax, they'd know that it was a good deal, because the olympics gave their business a huge boost.
Now having said that, terrorists probably do have good use-cases for one-time-pad encryption.
Not really. If you can arrange to share a secret, you may as well share a few bytes of key material you can use for AES keys for the encryption. Much easier to hide a few bytes than the larger amount you'd need for practical communications.
When one-time-pads are not practical, terrorists could use other third-party crypto add-ons
This is the right answer. There are solid open source implementations of all of the crypto primitives needed to build a good system, with standard hybrid asymmetric/symmetric crypto schemes.
Say I tell my friend in a message that I like two books.
Those two books become my source for a pad. so Dave the Spy and I pick up "Green Eggs and Ham", and "one fish two fish red fish blue fish" we both know to take the two books and XOR the two texts together to get our pad source file.
This isn't a one-time pad, this is a Vernam Cipher. It may be good enough in many cases; it certainly was 100 years ago. But it does not have the provable unbreakability of a one-time pad.
If you did use something like this, you should at least run the text of the books through a cryptographic hash function before using it.
Oh, one more thing: You should also ensure that every sector of every disk is read regularly. There are more sophisticated options available, but just setting up a cron job that does something like "cat/dev/sdX >/dev/null" on every drive once per week or so is a reasonable and very simple approach. The goal is to trigger failures early, before they get too bad.
Slashdot Mirror
More information for them to mine, which is what they really crave.
From https://support.google.com/pro..., emphasis mine:
What data does Project Shield collect?
We collect traffic metadata and cached content for website traffic passed through Project Shield. This helps us detect and defend against DDoS attacks.
We also ask for your website’s configuration data — your website's origin server, domains, and subdomains — to set up Project Shield. We hold on to this for as long as you have an account with Project Shield. You can delete your Project Shield account at any time.
Data and web traffic may be processed and stored in the US or other countries.
How do you use my website and website visitors’ data?
Project Shield collects web traffic logs, and other data on how we serve your traffic, to help improve Project Shield's service and performance.
Project Shield does not collect data to improve search results or target advertising.
Does Google’s Privacy Policy apply to visitors to my website?
No. Your website’s own policies and terms of service — including how you manage user data and privacy — apply to people visiting your site, not Google’s privacy policy and terms of service.
Can people tell that I’m using Project Shield?
Yes. Domain Name System (DNS) records are public information and will show that you are pointed at Project Shield servers. When you set up Project Shield, you point your traffic at Project Shield servers. Anyone can use a public website to look up your DNS records and see what IP address or host name your website points to.
You might want to look into frangible rounds. They're pretty reliable these days
Sure, if by "reliable" you mean "make a wide, shallow, ugly-looking wound that doesn't cause sufficient bleeding to make the attacker stop". In general, I recommend sticking with what the police use. They have the resources and the need to do the relevant testing. They don't use frangible rounds, they use standard JHPs.
Isn't Nexus guaranteed only 18 months of updates, and if owners get updates after that, lucky them?
Two years of platform upgrades from release date, or 18 months after the last device is sold from the play store, whichever is longer.
Three years of security updates from release date, or 30 months after the last device is sold from the play store, whichever is longer.
Avoiding being open source because you don't understand how to create a modern business model around it is a problem that largely went away over a decade ago.
Nonsense. Yes, there are successful business models around open source, but they're more challenging to maintain and manage, and tend to to have growth ceilings that traditional models do not. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with closed source models, unless they're forcing out open source solutions. Given the existence of gitlab, that's clearly not the case here. Github should do what its owners believe is best for their business. Customers will either stick with them, or not. So far, it's working pretty well for them.
A further initiative these guys are taking that I fully endorse: and end to the so-called "land-fill Android" syndrome
I don't see anything about the other big cause of land-fill Android syndrome: software updates. Are they also going to update the phone to new OS versions for a decade or so?
Of course it will backfire. People will have to save more fore retirement since they cannot count on positive interest to produce gains.
That would be a particularly foolish response.
The smart response to negative interest (and deflation) is to spend your money on durable and valuable goods. Predicting what will hold value is challenging, of course.
BULLSHIT!
See, if someone controls the network, they can also trivially do a man in the middle attack. Just like all the other crap.
You don't know anything about TLS and PKI, I see. Go read up on it and then come back and we can discuss like adults.
Here's the thing, I dont really care about something as trivial as a /. account. To expend efforts on securing that against all manner of threats wastes resources.
You missed the point, completely. It's not that someone may snoop on your /. browsing or credentials, it's that someone will inject arbitrary other content into what you're retrieving from the /. server, which can be used to compromise your machine, extract credentials from your browser, etc.
Also TLS is not immune to MITM attacks. It makes it harder, sure but not immune.
Unless the attacker has compromised a CA, and barring bugs in your TLS stack (which used to be a big problem, but has recently gotten cleaned up), yes it is immune to MITM attacks.
Besides this you've got the traditional methods of social engineering, for example, a user goes to hsbc.co.uk and the rouge access point is configured to send them to hsbc.malice.com which looks identical to HSBC's internet banking site.
Unless you look at your browser window to see if the connection is secure.
We really need to get to a point where all web sites use TLS and browsers can be configured (or are configured by default!) to reject any HTTP connection. Then you won't need to look.
Granted, the risk of this kind of attack is low, which is why it's not worth protecting my /. account but it is worth protecting my banking details and credit card numbers.
You fail to understand the threat models here. The point is that your bank's site was built under the assumption that the network between the bank and your computer is untrustworthy, while slashdot was built with the assumption that it is trustworthy. When you know it's not, you're still safe with the bank because no security assumptions are being violated. Not so with slashdot.
I've always found it wise to err on the side of caution.
Except that you're erring on the side of risk because you don't understand the security issues.
Oh really? So y'all have re-engineered Nest not to connect to Google's "cloud" anymore, then? 'Cause for IoT stuff, "security" means nothing less than the owner hosting his own server!
That may be your definition but it's hardly the only one, and it's not one that's at all interesting to the vast majority of people, who have no interest at all in hosting their own server and like what the cloud provides.
Also, Nest does not use Brillo. Maybe it will in the future, dunno.
I use free wifi for browsing /. but not for doing banking
That's backwards. Your bank's web site is authenticated, so your browser can fairly strongly verify that it's legitimate, and the data is encrypted and authenticated so it can't be modified. Browsing /. (or any non-TLS web site), on the other hand, is dangerous because the Wifi operator can inject whatever they like into the stream. Exploits that target your browser, drive-by downloads, ads, tracking cookies (for any site)... whatever they like.
Unless your bank has screwed something up, you can safely do your banking on a hostile network, but browsing /. is risky.
Same engineers who are busy throwing together the IoT without a second thought on security?
I can tell you the Google Brillo (Google's Android-derived IoT OS) team is definitely focused on security. Most of them came from the ChromeOS team, which is extraordinarily secure, and they brought that focus with them (plus Google in general is pretty good about taking security seriously).
I'd agree if you fled and then had to be captured to come back for trial. Coming back voluntarily, specifically to be tried, puts a rather different spin on it.
The problem is he wants a fair trial, AS DEFINED BY EDWARD SNOWDEN.
I imagine he would define "fair" as in "not held in a secret/closed courtroom, with the press allowed to attend, with a jury of his peers, with his defense being allowed to actually see the evidence against him, etc."
And, no, he's never going to get all that.
And bail. Which should be a slam dunk in a fair courtroom. Since Snowden would have returned voluntarily to have his day in court, the judge shouldn't consider him a flight risk.
Now it won't be their system which is insecure, it'll be your phone. This gives them another layer of defense against their often laughably bad security.
Except that, according to federal law, they're liable for the fraud anyway.
To be precise, for ATM and debit cards (which this would be), your liability varies according to how quickly you report a lost or stolen card. $0 if you report the loss before it's used, $50 if you report the loss within two days after you learn about it, $500 if you report it within 60 days after your statement (containing fraudulent transactions) is sent to you. For a phone-based version, if it turns out to be vulnerable to attacks and you're defrauded as a result of that while the phone is in your possession, the FTC would force the banks to eat all of the fraud because there's no way you could have known to report. If your phone is lost or stolen, the normal reporting rules would apply.
Also, it's rather ridiculous that you think your phone is less secure than a piece of plastic with a magnetic stripe on it. The security of your ATM/debit card, what there is of it, lies entirely in the PIN because copying magnetic stripes is trivial (called "skimming"). And that PIN doesn't provide much security because the classic way to commit ATM/debit card fraud is with a fake ATM or point of sale device which captures your magstripe when you swipe, and your PIN when you enter it.
Your phone does have additional attack vectors because it is a networked device, but mobile phone OSes already have protections in place to mitigate that. iOS has the secure enclave and Android has the hardware-backed keystore[*], both of which allow the phone to carry non-extractable cryptographic credentials which are bound to user authentication (though Android only started providing the authentication binding in Marshmallow, so it'll be a couple of years before it's widespread, but it'll take longer than that to widely deploy new ATMs).
Banks will also apply their normal risk management engines to decide if the transaction is legitimate, and the phone offers a far richer set of data elements they can use, making it harder to convince their systems that a fraudulent transaction isn't legitimate.
Banks clearly are not "passing the buck", because federal law won't let them. No, they're doing this because it really will be more secure, which will save them money by reducing the fraud they have to cover. This is a totally self-interested move on their part, sure, and the goal is to reduce fraud liability, but your cynical interpretation of how that will happen is dead wrong.
I don't see how what you know how to do or are interested in learning to do are at all relevant to the impact of the breach or why the attackers might be interested in selling the database.
I'd strip out the time checks and security from the phpBB script, run it locally, and hammer that with a dictionary and then a brute force attack. It'd work and I'm gonna get results
Sure, but a few orders of magnitude slower than doing the hashing locally on dedicated hardware.
The best way to do this is to run the hashing on a set of GPUs, each of which has dozens to hundreds of cores. With your method you'll be lucky to test a thousand passwords per second. With dedicated hardware -- and assuming a computationally cheap hash like SHA-256 or MD-5, you can build a system that will test a billion passwords per second for a few thousand dollars -- or rent one on AWS or similar for a few hundred dollars (AWS has systems with GPUs for computation). If the target database used a proper password hashing algorithm like PBKDF2, scrypt, bcrypt, Argon2, etc., then it's slower on a given amount of hardware, but you can always speed it up by throwing more hardware at it.
Doesn't phpBB use different salts for each user? If they do and if I am understanding properly then I'm not sure how far they'll get? Though, to be clear, I am not 100% certain that I'm understanding everything correctly. They really shouldn't be able to do much in the way of brute forcing?
Doesn't matter.
Unique salt (which is the only way to do salt; there's zero reason to bother salting if the salts aren't unique), just means that each password has to be brute forced individually. But passwords can be tested so fast that a high percentage of passwords on most sites are found with only a few minutes effort, so brute forcing is well worth the effort.
Passwords suck, and they're getting worse all the time.
This woman is either a idiot savant, or she's a political genius who should have run for office
Or she's a normal 60 year-old woman of average intelligence, who lived through the Cold War and isn't a poli-sci major, and therefore conflates authoritarianism and communism because for most of her life political discourse drew no distinction between the two. So she just used what she knew to be a pointed "synonym" for authoritarianism.
The fact that this is a beautiful smear of the government policy was intentional, but inevitably so, not due to particular cleverness on her part. The reason "communism" is a smear is because of that same Cold War history. Had the Cold War authoritarian opponent been under some other system, that's what the woman would conflate with authoritarianism... and associating this action with that other system would have been a beautiful smear.
According to https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/r...:
Modern nuclear plans with light water reactors have strong manoeuvring capabilities. Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode, i.e. participate in the primary and secondary frequency control, and some units follow a variable load programme with one or two large power changes per day. In France, load-following is needed to balance daily and weekly power variations of the electricity supply and demand, since nuclear power plants have a large share in the national mix. In Germany, load-following became important in recent years when a large share of intermittent sources of electricity generation (e.g. wind) was introduced to the national mix.
The minimum requirements for the manoeuvrability capabilities of the modern reactors are defined by the utilities requirements that are based on the requirements of the grid operators. For example, according to the current version of the European Utilities Requirements (EUR) the NPP must at least be capable of daily load cycling operation between 50% and 100% of its rated power P r , with a rate of change of electric output of 3-5% of P r per minute.
Most of the modern designs implement even higher manoeuvrability capabilities, with the possibility of planned and unplanned load-following in the wide power range and with ramps of 5%P r per minute. Some designs are capable of extremely fast power modulations in the frequency regulation mode with ramps of several percent of the rated power per second, in the narrow band around the power level. The economic consequences of load-following are mainly related to the reduction of the load factor. In the case of nuclear, fuel costs represent a small fraction of the electricity generating cost, if compared with fissile sources. Thus, operating at higher load factors is profitable for nuclear power plants, since they cannot make savings on the fuel cost while not producing electricity. In France, the impact of load- following on the average unit capability factor is sometimes estimated as about 1.2%.
Since most of the currently used nuclear power plants implement strong manoeuvrability capabilities in their designs (except for some very old NPPs), there is no or very small impact (within the design margins) of the load-following on acceleration of ageing of large equipment components. However, there is some influence of the load-following on the ageing of some operational components (e.g. valves), and thus one can expect a slight increase of the maintenance costs. Also, for older plants some additional investment could be needed, especially in instrumentation and control, in order to become eligible for operation in the load-following mode.
Overeating can be a coping mechanism for environmental stress. Abusive parents who nevertheless keep the fridge well-stocked could cause a kid to be fat. I'm not saying that's what the GP's principal believed, but excessive weight could be a sign of emotional abuse.
Nice selective reading/quoting. You forgot to mention "tourism spending has gone up 2 billion dollars in the 10 years since the Olympics". Compared to that, the $4.5M annual deficit of the venues is chump change. If needed they could just levy a small tax on every non-resident ski lift ticket sold and cover that easily. But they don't have to, because there's an endowment which is still funding them (though it will run out eventually).
And while the ski resort owners would undoubtedly complain about the tax, they'd know that it was a good deal, because the olympics gave their business a huge boost.
Now having said that, terrorists probably do have good use-cases for one-time-pad encryption.
Not really. If you can arrange to share a secret, you may as well share a few bytes of key material you can use for AES keys for the encryption. Much easier to hide a few bytes than the larger amount you'd need for practical communications.
When one-time-pads are not practical, terrorists could use other third-party crypto add-ons
This is the right answer. There are solid open source implementations of all of the crypto primitives needed to build a good system, with standard hybrid asymmetric/symmetric crypto schemes.
Say I tell my friend in a message that I like two books. Those two books become my source for a pad. so Dave the Spy and I pick up "Green Eggs and Ham", and "one fish two fish red fish blue fish" we both know to take the two books and XOR the two texts together to get our pad source file.
This isn't a one-time pad, this is a Vernam Cipher. It may be good enough in many cases; it certainly was 100 years ago. But it does not have the provable unbreakability of a one-time pad.
If you did use something like this, you should at least run the text of the books through a cryptographic hash function before using it.
Why is it even possible to flash firmware if the device is locked?
So devices can be upgraded.
Oh, one more thing: You should also ensure that every sector of every disk is read regularly. There are more sophisticated options available, but just setting up a cron job that does something like "cat /dev/sdX > /dev/null" on every drive once per week or so is a reasonable and very simple approach. The goal is to trigger failures early, before they get too bad.